6 free AI visibility checkers compared (2026). What you actually get before a paywall.

A free AI visibility checker is supposed to tell you whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google recommend your business when a customer asks what to buy. Six free options are worth testing in 2026: HubSpot's AI Search Grader (free 3-engine brand grade, then $50/mo), Ahrefs' AI Visibility Checker and Brand Radar (free public brand snapshot, with paid add-ons from $50/mo to $699/mo), AthenaHQ's Essential Free tier (300 credits on 5 engines, then $295/mo), Profound's 7-day trial (50 prompts a day on 3 engines, then custom Enterprise pricing), Otterly.AI's free trial (4 base engines from $29/mo, with Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode sold as add-ons), and our own WhyIQ AI Radar free check (10 prompts across all 5 engines for 50 live answers, then $29/mo flat).

Because we build one of the six, we checked the receipts on every other vendor on 9 November 2026 and wrote down where each competitor beats us. The difference between these free checks is rarely the button on the landing page. It is whether the tool asks unbranded buyer questions or only flatters your brand name, whether it runs live web retrieval or reads old training weights, and which engines get left behind the paywall.

Side-by-side limits of the six free checkers, verified from each vendor's live site on 9 November 2026.

Before you trust a green score from any free grader, check which of these three shortcuts it took to produce the number.

Trap 1: Training-data memory versus live web search. When a real buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for a supplier recommendation today, the engine triggers live web retrieval, pulls current third-party pages, and cites URLs in the answer. Several free graders skip live retrieval altogether. HubSpot's AI Search Grader states plainly in its product FAQ that it queries each model on how it characterizes your brand based on its training data. That measures whether an older model snapshot remembers your company name, not whether a live web search cites your site today.

Trap 2: Branded vanity prompts versus unbranded buyer discovery. Asking an AI engine "What is [Your Brand] and what is its sentiment?" almost always returns a flattering answer if your domain has been online for more than a year. In a 57.2-million-citation study by Foundation and AirOps (2026), a brand's own content appeared in 77.6% of answers to questions that named the brand, while brand-owned domains captured just 2.2% of citations on unbranded discovery questions like "best payroll software for UK contractors." A free checker built around your brand name measures reputation among people who already know you. Unbranded prompts measure whether new buyers ever hear your name at all.

Trap 3: Leaving Claude and Google AI Mode off the free tier. Watch the engine list carefully. HubSpot's grader and Profound's 7-day trial both test three engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, and either Perplexity or Google AI Overviews). AthenaHQ's free tier tests five engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, and Copilot) but holds Claude and Google AI Mode back for its $295/mo plan. Even inside Ahrefs' paid plans, querying Claude costs 8 checks per update against 1 check for other models because Anthropic's API is expensive to run. If your buyers are developers, founders, or B2B operators who live inside Claude and Google AI Mode, a three-engine free check leaves half the board dark.

Every free tool on this list was built to sell a specific paid product. Knowing what the paid product does tells you what the free check is optimizing for.

1. HubSpot AI Search Grader (Best for a 60-second brand sentiment read). HubSpot's grader is the most searched free AEO tool on the web for good reason: you type in your company name, describe what you sell, and get a 0-to-100 score broken into Sentiment (40 points), Presence Quality (20 points), Brand Recognition (20 points), Share of Voice (10 points), and Market Competition (10 points) across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. No HubSpot account is required, and if you want ongoing tracking across those three engines, HubSpot AEO is a clean $50/mo standalone subscription. Where it falls short for buyer discovery: it evaluates brand characterization from model training data rather than live cited URLs on unbranded buyer prompts, and it does not check Claude or Google AI Mode.

2. Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker & Brand Radar (Best for off-site mention research if you already own Ahrefs). Ahrefs gives you two free entry points. Anyone can run a fast, no-signup brand snapshot on its public AI Visibility Checker page to preview mentions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Google AI Overviews. And if you already pay for an Ahrefs subscription ($129/mo Lite and up), Ahrefs now includes 150 checks/mo on Lite (5 prompts on 1 platform daily), 300 on Standard, and 600 on Advanced, plus free AI traffic analytics in Web Analytics. Where Ahrefs genuinely beats every specialist tool here is the sheer scale of its 551-million-prompt search-backed index. The catch is the paywall step: unlocking the full AI Visibility Index costs $199/mo per model ($699/mo for all models), and custom prompt tracking is metered per check with Claude burning 8 checks per update.

3. AthenaHQ Essential Free Tier (Best free sandbox for experimenting with custom prompt lists). Unlike one-shot graders, AthenaHQ gives you a real self-serve workspace on its Essential (Free) tier with 300 free credits ($25 value, where 1 credit equals 1 AI response) and unlimited team seats. Because you choose the prompts, you can run 60 different buyer questions across its five free-tier engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Copilot) before hitting zero. Two trade-offs matter: Claude and Google AI Mode are locked out of the free tier, and the first paid step is $295/month for Starter. If a $295/mo subscription is outside your budget, treat the 300 free credits as a one-time diagnostic sprint.

4. Profound 7-Day Free Trial (Best for enterprise teams evaluating agent traffic analytics). Profound retired its old self-serve paid tiers in late 2026 in favor of a 7-day free trial that runs 50 unique prompts daily across three engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews) in one language and one region. Fifty prompts a day for a week is 350 prompt-days of data, which is generous. The limits are equally clear on their pricing page: no Perplexity or Claude on the trial, no CSV/JSON exports, no historical lookback once the week ends, and converting to a paid account requires an Enterprise sales demo. Use Profound's trial if you are an enterprise buyer evaluating its CDN Agent Analytics; skip it if you want a self-serve monthly tool.

5. Otterly.AI Free Trial (Best if Microsoft Copilot is a core channel for your buyers). Otterly offers a self-serve free trial of its daily tracker alongside free GEO quick-check utilities, and its Lite plan starts at $29/month for 15 search prompts across four engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, with unlimited team seats. If Copilot matters more to your sales motion than Claude, Otterly gives you an engine we do not track. Watch the add-on arithmetic before you upgrade: Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode are priced as separate per-engine add-ons ranging from $9 to $439/mo depending on tier and model. (We break down the full paid math in our 7-tool AEO pricing comparison.)

6. WhyIQ AI Radar Free Check (Best for seeing who wins your unbranded buyer questions across all 5 engines). We built our free AI Radar check specifically to fix the three traps above. Enter your domain and email (no credit card, no password), review or edit the 10 sample prompts (9 unbranded buyer questions matched to what you sell plus 1 brand question), and Radar runs all 10 live across all 5 engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode. That is 50 live AI answers streamed onto your screen in up to 10 minutes, and your workspace stays open for 30 days with the exact answer text, every cited URL, the named competitors beating you on each question, and a ranked action plan. If you want weekly tracking afterward, paid plans start at $29/mo flat for 30 prompts across all 5 engines ($12 for your first month).

Since these checks cost nothing, the smartest move is often combining two that measure different things.

Run HubSpot + WhyIQ AI Radar if you want the fastest executive contrast: HubSpot shows how model training data describes your brand in 60 seconds, and Radar shows what happens 10 minutes later when real buyers ask unbranded category questions across all five live engines. Seeing a 75/100 brand sentiment grade next to a 10% unbranded AI visibility score is usually the fastest way to get a team aligned on which buyer prompts to track.

Run Ahrefs + AthenaHQ if you already pay for Ahrefs and want to test 50+ custom prompt variations in a single afternoon using AthenaHQ's 300 free credits before deciding whether you need a dedicated tracker at all.

And when you should skip WhyIQ's free check: skip our free check if you refuse to enter an email address (use Ahrefs' public checker instead, which requires no signup at all). Skip it if you want to test 50 prompts on day one without paying (use Profound's 7-day trial or AthenaHQ's 300 free credits). And skip it if Microsoft Copilot is your primary target engine, because Otterly, Ahrefs, and AthenaHQ include Copilot and we do not. You can also see how our broader product suite stacks up on our comparison hub.

Run a brand-name grader to see what AI remembers about you. Run an unbranded 5-engine check to see which competitor AI recommends instead of you.

Every free check on this page, including ours, gives you a one-point-in-time sample of a probabilistic system.

Large language models do not return a static top-10 list the way classic search engines used to. Ask the exact same buyer question twice and the cited URLs shift: in AirOps' 2026 study of repeated prompt executions, only 30% of brands remained consistently visible from one AI answer run to the next. Over a 30-day window, 40 to 60% of the domains cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews turn over completely (Profound, 2025).

That variance is why a free check is a great diagnostic and a terrible finish line. Use the free run to spot the high-intent questions where a rival is getting cited and to inspect the pages the engines prefer. Then apply the on-page and off-site fixes from our AI Citability Playbook (remembering that third-party web brand mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.66 to 0.71 across ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews, per Ahrefs 2025) and measure weekly so you can tell a real visibility gain from a lucky single roll.